In recent years, many companies have moved away from using their own dedicated hardware in many computing areas. Instead, these companies are shifting towards cloud computing resources, which are on-demand computer system resources, especially those that cater to data storage and computing power, and for which the companies do not have direct and/or active management over. In many cases the physical hosts of these cloud computing resources are physically hosted at data centers located in geographically dispersed locations and are available to the companies via the Internet.